Former tech executive Andrew Yang speaks during the Democratic Presidential Debate at Texas Southern University's Health and PE Center on September 12, 2019 in Houston, Texas.

This much is true: The winner of the 2020 presidential election will almost certainly be a senior citizen.

Republican Donald Trump is 73. The top three Democrats, according to current polls, are 76-year old Joe Biden, 70-year old Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, who at 78 was born two months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Meantime, the median age in the United States, says the latest Census Bureau data, is 37.8. That means half of all Americans are younger than that.

With all due respect to the above-mentioned gray hairs from both parties, I think the forces that are changing our country at an accelerating pace—climate, demography, technology and more—may be beyond the ability of some to recognize, let alone handle. Biden is a cautious incrementalist. Sanders and Warren are Robin Hood wealth redistributionists. Trump is unstable and delusional. All seem focused too much on the rear view mirror and not enough on the road ahead. We need new ideas, new thinking, and an honest, civil and bipartisan debate about what lies ahead.

This is one reason why I’ve become a fan of Andrew Yang, the 44-year old entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Yang won’t be president come 2021, but his new thinking, new approaches and can-do spirit have impressed me with their optimism, intelligence and authenticity. His track record is one of taking calculated, data-driven risks in the marketplace and making them pay off. As CEO of test-prep education company Manhattan GMAT, Yang helped build up the firm and then sold it to industry leader Kaplan for an undisclosed sum in 2009. The Columbia Law School grad’s latest effort, Venture for America, is a New York City-based nonprofit that trains entrepreneurs, who then go on to create jobs in struggling American cities.

Yang’s focus on entrepreneurial activity and risk-taking in hollowed-out areas of America’s heartland is predicated on a truth that the professional politicians mentioned above have barely acknowledged: That most manufacturing jobs lost in America have little to do with China—which is Trump’s principal culprit—but automation.

“The reason why Donald Trump won the election 2016 is that we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa; all the swing states he needed to win and did win,” Yang, has correctly pointed out
.

But this economic upheaval is just getting started. Numerous warnings by the likes of MIT, McKinsey & Company, and Bain & Company say that by 2030—just a decade from now—anywhere from 20% to 40% of American jobs will be automated. You’ve no doubt heard of cars and trucks that drive themselves, but what about machines that can read X-rays and powerful new algorithms that respond to customer-service inquiries faster and more efficiently than humans? And much more. Yang, citing these studies, is bunt: “In the next 12 years, 1 out of 3 American workers are at risk of losing their jobs to new technologies—and unlike with previous waves of automation, this time new jobs will not appear quickly enough in large enough numbers to make up for it.”

The underlying premise of Yang’s focus is that you can’t solve a problem without first admitting that it exists. The fact is that the U.S. manufacturing sector—as a percentage of both GDP and the labor force—has been declining steadily since World War II, long before China became a worry. Yang acknowledges this. Trump, on the other hand, keeps bashing the Chinese like they’re solely to blame, and he does this because that’s what works with his base. Trump cares more about this than the broader and more complex truth—and that’s why he’ll never be able to solve the problem. Like many politicians, Trump is good at scaring people and telling them who to resent and who to be afraid of. In a fearful, cynical age, that’s how you win votes—but it’s not how you solve problems.

The coming disruption of the American labor force—and the industrialized world as a whole—requires what I mentioned above: New ideas and new thinking. Yang’s idea is something called a “Freedom Dividend,” a universal basic income for all American adults, no strings attached. He proposes $1,000 per month. Yang is careful to emphasize that this is not some big new government program, but a consolidation of existing programs plus a value-added tax of 10% on the production of goods or services a business produces. This is intriguing because, as Yang’s website points out. “it makes it much harder for large corporations, who are experts at hiding profits and income, to avoid paying their fair share.” This will become more important in the coming years because “as technology improves because you cannot collect income tax from robots or software.”

People already receiving government assistance for things like welfare and food stamps would have to choose between keeping their current benefits and the $1,000—but would not get both; Yang claims this would pay for itself over the long run, given studies showing that every $1 given to a poor parent results in as much as $7 in cost-savings and economic growth.

Would this really work? The notion of some sort of basic income is actually a very American idea dating back to Thomas Paine. Yang, an unabashed capitalist, says “ businesses perform better
, markets perform better and people perform better if there is money to spend in consumers hands.”

Is this an endorsement? No, but it is an endorsement of the idea of having more presidential candidates who are willing to think out of the box, move beyond focus-group tested debate lines and lead us into a discussion about the way forward. Yang’s an honest, smart young man with serious ideas. We need more smart honest young men—and women—if we’re to find our way in the difficult years ahead.

Paul Brandus is the White House bureau chief for West Wing Reports. You can follow him on Twitter WestWingReport.

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